Pretoria - The court will on Tuesday hear whether an affidavit submitted in a case where former intelligence officer Bongani Cele is being accused of falsifying information will be evidence enough during the trial.
Cele, 49, is on trial in the Pretoria Specialised Commercial Crimes Court facing two charges relating to contravening the Regulation of Communication and Provision of Communication-Related Information Act (Rica). He is being accused of falsifying information to spy on two journalists.
The matter commenced as a trial-within-a-trial as Cele, through his defence attorney, disputed the submission of statements and affidavits he had allegedly made four years ago. This affidavit, Cele’s defence attorney argues, should not be submitted as evidence despite the investigating officer saying that the accused confirmed the accuracy of its contents.
Cele’s attorney said while his client admits to having taken part in signing a warning statement on March 16, 2012, as well as an affidavit, there is a dispute between the State and the accused as to which statement was being referred to at the time. The accused alleges he was referring to one statement and the State is saying he was referring to another.
But the State is having none of this, saying that the accused confirmed the accuracy of its contents.
He allegedly lied to a judge to get an interception warrant by matching the two journalists’ phone numbers and that of the then national police commissioner Bheki Cele with fictional names in an affidavit. He apparently pretended it was required for a probe into a criminal syndicate.
The monitored pair in question were Mzilikazi wa Afrika and Stephan Hofstatter, both senior investigative journalists for the Sunday Times.
The investigating officer said he met Cele and his colleagues at a Durban hotel where they gave him statements confirming previous statements they had made about their involvement with the application for the warrants.
Cele’s defence lawyer said his client would testify that the investigating officer did not give them the previous statements to read. As a result, they thought they were confirming the contents of statements relating to suspension notices and not the warrants he said.
Pretoria News